Leather Material
By Neil Blevins
June 15th 2005
Here's a tutorial on how to create a leather material. My tests were
done in 3dsmax, but the theory of how to put the material together
works for all 3d apps, and I've included at the bottom a max and maya
example file.
The basic ingredients are as follows:
- Color: whatever color of leather you're after.
- Highlight: medium height, large base.
- Bump: perhaps some noise mixed with cellular
Here are a few real photographs of leather. When making any material,
having good reference is a must. That way you can first dissect the
photo to decide what elements make up the material you're trying to
replicate, and then you have something to compare your cg image to.
These were found on the Google Image search.
Here's a black leather chair I grabbed from
here.
Here's a leather pouch that I grabbed from here.
First off I made some simple geometry.
For the color, I just added a regular brown, but you
could also use a bitmap if you wanted more variation to the color.
Next comes the highlight, Blinn with a wide base, but a medium
height. Another possibility is to use a real reflection of a white
card or the environment, but for this tut, we'll just use a regular
highlight.
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